Everything You Need to Know to Photograph the Northern Lights

The Northern Lights are a spectacle like no other. Photographing them is a dance between you, your camera, and lady aurora.

When I saw the Northern Lights for the first time, I fell in love. Nothing beats standing underneath a glowing night sky. For many people, it is an unbeatable existential experience. Having photographed the lights for years at popular locations in both Iceland and Norway, I have often heard distant cheering and howling from fellow photographers when the lights appear.

Photographing the Northern Lights is itself not hard. Photographing them and getting an optimal photo is hard, though. It requires constant adaptation to the changing composition and amount of light. This kind of photography also require cameras and lenses that have been designed with light sensitivity in mind. Fast lenses and high-ISO performance cameras are optimal for getting sharp and clean photos of the Northern Lights.

In the above video, I share all the information on how to photograph the Northern Lights I could think of. I cover everything: clothing, the physics, camera settings, locations, and how to predict the aurorae. Predicting the aurorae can be hard, and I show why the KP value is not a reliable way of predicting the aurorae. I wish you all a good hunt!

Danish Fine Art Landscape Photographer and YouTuber. He is taking photos all over the world but the main focus is the cold, rough, northern part of Europe. His style is somewhere in between dramatic and colorful fantasy and Scandinavian minimalism. Be sure to check out his YouTube channel for epic landscape photography videos from around the world.